Scott McCloud lectures at IUPUI

Wednesday, March 7, 7 p.m. at IU School of Informatics, 535 W. Michigan St., IT 152

Scott McCloud and his family were crossing the state line, headed into Florida. McCloud has recently published Making Comics, his third book on the nature of the medium of comics, and McCloud and his family decided to take the idea of a book tour to the extreme and spend 50 weeks going to all 50 states.

“It’s been exciting, it has its ups and downs, but it’s been an amazing time,” McCloud said.

“We’ve been to the top of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, played in autumn leaves in Vermont, my daughters saw their first snow. We caught Mardi Gras beads at a parade in Lafayette and we’re only scratching the surface.”

Making Comics grew out of the seminars that McCloud taught in the wake of his exploration into comics and the creative process, 1993’s Understanding Comics and its revolutionary sequel, Reinventing Comics.

“I was doing these seminars and ideas kept tumbling out, and I realized that I wanted to put them into a forum where more than 25 people at a time could see them.”

While there are separate thematic elements to all three books, at their heart the books are an exploration of how comics work and the nature of the medium. The results are some of the most accessible, cogent and intelligent work on creativity published in years. “Some people feel like [Making Comics] is a return to many of the original ideas in Understanding Comics,” McCloud said. “For my part, I know that I worked hard to improve the artwork.”

McCloud has also been a huge advocate for Web comics and has seen that movement grow and mature. “We’ve got tens of thousands making Web comics online and probably a few more than that reading them. We’re at a point where many peoples’ first comics are Web comics.”